Buying Freedom
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Rayna and I bought a house. It is situated in Walkley, Sheffield, about half an hour's walk from the town center. It's a little run down, but structurally sound, in need of some tender loving care to nurture it back to its stoic, Victorian, steel-worker-spirited beauty. We hope to move in before my 60th birthday.
Fifty-nine is quite old to be buying a first house—and perhaps twenty-seven is a bit young. But here we are, married, two children, home of our own. Just like grown ups. I admit to having mixed feelings about the whole endeavour. In my newsletter of February 2017 I wrote, perhaps a little self-righteously, about my concern with "storing up treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal", yet here we are with one big treasure, firmly planted on earth, with an insurance policy to cover our losses should thieves break in and steal. We've bought ourselves a liability, for sure, but we've bought ourselves something else too: our freedom.
Living as tenants, while offering the chance to easily move on, comes with a sense of imprisonment, an absence of autonomy. We are answerable to a landlord, and directed on how we ought to live our lives. Our last landlord in Twickenham refused to improve the property to make it child-friendly, so we paid for many improvements ourselves, obliged to leave them behind on departure. Our lease only guaranteed us a year's stay at a time, and we could be turfed out on a whim. The landlord forbade us from keeping pets, or painting the walls anything other than white, our attic was full of his junk, and we continually worried about the damage the children were doing to walls, floors and other fixtures. It started to feel that we were not masters of our own destiny, but beholden to another. Buying a house thus offered a sense of freedom for all of us. We can have ten dogs, fifteen cats, ferrets, rats and monkeys, scribbles on the walls, dented floorboards, a tree house and coffee stains on the ceiling.
Our house was a gift, a bequeathment. More by luck than speculation my parents bought their home in an unfashionable-soon-to-be-fashionable part of London back in the late 1960s, and sold it forty-two years later, creating a surplus that my sisters and I inherited on my mother's death in 2015. This inheritance, plus some savings allowed us to buy the house outright, and not re-imprison ourselves with a mortgage. Given my moral opposition to debt and money-lending in any form, buying outright was really the only way we could have done this. I acknowledge we are in a privileged class, profiting from the falsely-inflated housing market. Again, mixed feelings.
I'm travelling for work throughout September, October and November, scarcely home for more than a few days at a time, so not in a position to renovate the house myself, something I've done many times in the past on other people's homes. That's a little sad, but we'd like to move in before the end of the year, so we are engaging local contractors and craftsmen to make our empty house into a liveable home. One shouldn't generalise, or stereotype, but honestly, our experience here so far shows us that Sheffield people are warm, friendly and neighbourly, and a pleasure to engage with. We've already found local, skilled people to take on much of the work, so high hopes of moving in sometime in the late autumn. I'll keep you posted.
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August News
Today, 31st August, Rayna celebrated 10,000 days of life. Well, celebration is not exactly what we did, spending the day mostly apart, and engaging in dysfunctional conversation when finally together. It ended in a foot massage though, my token gift, my small amends. Tomorrow we get to go out, just the two of us, so we'll celebrate 10001 days instead, a well-balanced palindromic number.August was a month without work, which allowed us to focus on the house purchase, which finally closed on the 21st. Rayna and Asrai took a few days break in London, to visit museums and sightsee. And then a week later Rayna went back alone for a few more days, to actually visit the galleries she wanted to visit, and meet with her sister-in-law, Juliette. Children, when present (which with us is mostly) do tend to dominate the itinerary. I stayed home with Zoë the first time, and both girls the second time, adventuring out to local parks, and to visit the wonderful Women in Circus exhibition at a local museum. The days rolled by, lazily.
And now, September is here, and the autumnal equinox approaches—that short moment of balance when light and darkness each release their dominance, and all the world is one. Listen for the murmur of content.
Tobias
August Writing
Again, I've published nothing this month. I've been writing privately about discomfort, poetry, awkward conversations and genetically modified leopards. One day this may all see the light of day in book form, but given my propensity for procrastination the words are currently just dangling from my person like badly-fitting clothes, whispering in my head like a dream.
1st September 2018, 3 am